Typography

Author(s): Raoul Hausmann and John Cullars

Source: Design Issues, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 71-73
Published by: MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511897
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Typography

Typography is the final result of a design process. From the first

Reprinted with the kind permission of the

Archives of Berlinische Galerie.

phonetic signs up to different forms of scrolls, tablets, and printed

characters, the path followed represents an evolution differentiated

by several generally neglected points of view. Our current letters are

arbitrary signs; they have only reached this stage after an age old

process of remodeling signs. Initially they were very close to nature;

the phonetic and linguistic elements had found a pictorial counter-

part. Little by little this pictorial element became more and more

symbolic or, as it were, heraldic, finally resulting in the abstract

form of our typographic character which, in its final form of differ-

entiation, is no more than an aide-memoire. This development is

almost at an end. But the gathering, the particular animation of

ideoplastic phonetic signs forming the pages of a book, is still going

through a great many transformations. Certain historical periods

evolve simultaneously or successively with the abstract character of

the form of the signs reinforcing the effect through the visualization

of objects, the illustrative image. After each period of the formal

fixing of phonetic signs a period of dissolution, reduction, and relax-

ation has followed, accompanied by the introduction of the image

as accompaniment. Typography is an intermediate domain between

art and technology, between seeing and understanding, and it is one

of the most obvious means for the permanent psycho-physiological

auto-instruction of human beings. The design of this process, evok-

ing the special fashion of conceptual phonetic images by the differ-

ent shapes of each letter and by their proportions, requires a

particular type of perception that we call structural. In the field of

perception that never admits of any free (individual) feature, each

trait corresponds to a precise signification and entails new logical

characteristics, which are precise and entirely determined. Their

form is absolutely artificial and has nothing of the naturalistic about

them.

Old European books, with their reproductions of wood

engravings display strong agreement between the images and the

writing, because the symbolic values, or the structural composition

of design and writing arise from the same bases. The exactitude of

the reproduction plays virtually no role. The pictorial representation

was conceived according to literary viewpoints; its organization

corresponded to the text that accompanied it and, in its execution, it

functioned as an index and not as a sign in relation to nature. Since

the written signs were equally indices, the intellectual structure and

the formal structure of the reproduction were actually on the same

level. If, on the other hand, we look at a printed work from another

period, the Theuerdank, for example, we immediately notice that

Burgkmayer's composition and Schauffelin's images do not at all fit

Design Issues: Volume 14, Number 3 Autumn 1998 71

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the "image" of the page of printed text. The conception of physical

treatment is similar but the conception of the visual structure differs

completely. In the oldest incunabula, that structure had been the

same-the step that led then to the separation between the structure

of the image and the structure of the writing was caused by the

evolution of design, which, at that time, was becoming freer and

more naturalistic. The individualistic perception in Europe that led

to the invention of chiaroscuro by Leonardo da Vinci and

Rembrandt was founded on a regulation of spatial perception that

took place in the fifteenth century with the introduction and estab-

lishment of perspective, the structuring of distance. That was the

end of heraldic and hieroglyphic perception. Documentary percep-

tion-reproducing exact copies of objects, their relational disposi-

tions, and their situations in the natural visible space-became the

most important content of pictorial representation.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reached the summit

of naturalistic perception in the domain of typography and, at the

same time, the lowest physiological level in terms of rapid and easy

communication for reading. The first step beyond the naturalistic

anarchy had been made by the futurists and Dadaists. It obviously

resulted in a new anarchy, yet was oriented in a purely opto-

phonetic manner that had established the foundations of the new

typography. Until that time, one had rigorously observed the rule

which required that typographic composition for the page and

particularly for titles-be determined by the central axis. The futur-

ists and especially the Dadaists recognized that reading, even

phonetic communication, could only be effected visually. It was in

certain typographical pages produced around 1919 that this physio-

optical principle was realized for the first time in a coherent fashion.

One reason for the invention of the phonetic poem was supported

by an optical typography of a new kind. Photomontage-likewise

proclaimed by the Dadaist-had the same goal: the renewal and the

reinforcement of the physiological perception of typography. By that

time, people had already recognized that the ever greater need for

the image, the reduplication of the text by visual illustration, could

not be resolved by simple juxtaposition but required an optical

construction with a linguistic conceptual base. The new typography

again strayed from the path for technical reasons without having

furnished an optimal solution for the visualization of the phonetic

image on the printed page. The problem of a page composed

according to optical laws, that is the placing on the page of letters

and other visual elements treated as equivalent materials by mass

reproduction, had been realized to the utmost by print advertising.

Typography requires composition according to: (1) harmonious or

opposing elements of representation between the conceptual

content and its pictorial equivalent, and (2) the harmonious or

discordant construction of bodies of text and bodies of images

within the space of the page and their reciprocal equilibration by

72 Design Issues: Volume 14, Number 3 Autumn 1998

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points of attraction as for photography: the balancing of contrary

pairs-points of attraction/the masses represented/the structure of

details-and the composition of the page by a distribution of

chiaroscuro and a conceptual orientation.

Qualidt, 1932

Design Issues: Volume 14, Number 3 Autumn 1998 73

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